


Too Tired to Stop (You Old Pine Box)

by Northernflicker



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Drabble, Introspection, Memory Loss, Missing Scene, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-26 23:58:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6261052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Northernflicker/pseuds/Northernflicker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An exploration into the art of reliving your whole life on brief, cool August morning. Stan Pines holds the jagged edges of his own memories in his palms, speculating on the overall worth of an incomplete memory.   </p>
<p>(“And what if I never come back completely?” Stan asks, testing, but not really knowing why. </p>
<p>Ford’s eyes looks like a ship that sunk with the lanterns still lit. “That’s quite alright,” he says softly, and the muted glow he gives off smothers the few muffled, fragmented glimpses of anger and hate that Stan can recall in his mind’s eye.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Too Tired to Stop (You Old Pine Box)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a little late on the amnesia recovery fic train, but here it is anyway. This was a lot of fun to write

 The facts are these:

-Stan Pines (that's him), has existed for a very long time. Fifty-eight long years, in fact.

-In those fifty-eight years he met a lot of people, pulled a lot of scams, made a lot of people angry, and generally compiled about fifty-eight years’ worth of memories.

The list mostly ends there.

Some days he remembers more than others, but those are the only things he’s completely certain of. The other details float in and out of his consciousness. Sometimes he wakes up convinced that his brother hates him. Some days he wakes up and doesn't know he even has a brother. Sometimes he wakes up hating Stanford Pines. Sometimes he thinks he is Stanford Pines.

So, like he said, the details aren't important. The important part is the girl with sticky fingers and her brother with the hat and small smiles. They're the only things that make him feel like maybe it was all worth it (whatever "it" is).

In his mind he has a world that makes sense. Despite what everyone tells him, his story begins in a washed out green clearing. It smells like the smoke and scorched earth, it smells like singed hair and sunshine, it smells like the earth, wholesome and new again.

When he opens his eyes, it is anything but. The girl in pink -Mabel, that's her name- She sounds upset (and how does he know that? Some part of his mind remembers that it’s wrong for her to look that way). He tries his best to be gentle with her.  Somehow he manages to do it wrong, because the people in the clearing seem more upset than before. But they aren’t mad at him. They just look at him with long pitiful faces, a way that no one has ever looked at him before.

There's a man with an especially dapper suit on, if not slightly wrinkled. Later, he learns that the man, Stanford, also shares his face and his last name and part of his life too. For now, he just looks sad. He calls Stan a hero, he sounds like he might cry.

Another version of Stan is at last complete to hear those words. But this one isn’t. This version of Stan doesn’t know to miss the healing and absolution these words would have brought him. This version of Stan simply kneels in the clearing as if he was receiving an offering. (He receives some things, a suit and a fez and two dirty, small hands in his to lead him through the forest).

As for the rest, he’s just the tiniest bit exhausted of bright pink scrapbooks and stickers and hopeful glances. The scrapbook helps. Ford helps him through the painful parts, pushes his memory back onto him even when it keeps sliding off.

Still, when he thinks of home, a memory of thick green pine trees come to him before the sizzling heat of New Jersey sidewalks, sticky sweet gum on the boardwalk, splinters and matching grins. He hears the echoes of Dipper and Mabel’s young laughter before he can recall his own young voice. Gravity falls is the first thing he can remember with confidence, but he knows that it isn't his first home, not really.

Most of the time, his memory is very much like his New Jersey beach. The waves come in gently, and he holds onto it, lets it wash over him, before it sways and ebbs and retreats back into the ocean, the recess of his mind. Sometimes things wash up. Sometimes it’s phrases and faces he doesn’t know the names for. Sometimes, Ford isn’t enough to tell him who people are, he gets a faraway look in his eyes and says he never met them.

Stan learns to stop asking. He learns to weather the battering of intense anxiety and fear pounding in his heart when he’s in the kitchen and he thinks -without reason or cause- _Rico._

Rico is a name. It sends waves of dread and panic crashing down onto him, but he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know who Rico is exactly. He doesn’t remember how he knows him or what they did. He doesn’t know if Rico is a threat he should still be worrying about, or simply just a trick of his mind. He tries to chase the ancient paranoia from his bones and shake the name off. The waves ebb. The name fades along with it, and Stan lets it go, and hopes he doesn’t remember it again.

(In another universe, there's a Stan Pines who isn't as lucky. His amnesia is anterograde instead of retro. He's forever locked in his past, unable to hold onto the future). From what he hears and knows, his past wasn't too enjoyable, so he counts his blessings and doesn't miss it too much. He'd rather remember the happy version of his brother than the one who hated him, anyway.

In this version of the story, however, Stan Pines lives his life surrounded by people who wish he would return to the past. Eventually, they learn to stop wanting that.

That doesn't stop what little memories he has from trickling through. He wakes up with the tang of salt on his tongue and the sting of sand on a windy, gray afternoon, so Stan goes to find the only person who can make sense of it. It doesn't matter that he feels an acute sense of regret when he looks at his brother. It doesn't matter that he feels a twitch of something ancient kicking inside him, the slow beat of an earthy drum in his head. Stan sits beside Ford and feels the last violent throes of a dying, struggling memory in his brain fighting for the surface. The memory tries to claw and worm its way into sense, but it doesn’t quite make it.

What he’s left with is the sharp, salty tang of the sea perched on his tongue, a renewed image of two boys with smiles stretched tight and the inky tar of paint. In his memory, the wind is always pushing them along. But the air here is cold and still and smells like mud. He doesn't know how to feel about that or how to explain any of that to his brother. It isn't comforting. It's just sad.

"I miss the ocean," he tells Ford, instead. He ignores the bittersweet way Ford looks at him, choosing instead to focus on the echo in his head, from a lifetime away. _Pines, Pines, Pines!_

"Me too," Ford says, and he isn't distant or sad. It's a thoughtful quiet. Stan knows he's also remembering the musk of damp oak and the dry heat of peeling sunburns.

The morning is damp and cold and Stan Pines comes back to himself slowly, filling out the ancient creaking in his bones, the hollow in his chest, but the only truth he’s certain of is that his memory never quite manages to come back to him completely.  

“What if my memory never comes back fully?” Stan asks, feeling like they’ve already exhausted this conversation. He knows this, but he asks anyway. He knows what Ford will say before he says it. He doesn’t know why his mind keeps leading him down this route.  

“I’m sure it will,” Ford says immediately, in an exhale, as if the scripted reassurance was crowding his throat, pushing at the edge of his tongue, scraping the roof off his mouth with the immense pressure of blind support, just waiting for the cue to be released into the air between them.

That’s all everyone says these days. _Be patient._ They are slow and kind with him. He wonders how long it will last before they get tired, frustrated, impatient with him.

“But what if I never come back completely?” Stan presses, but not really knowing why. Ford doesn’t take a deep breath of square his shoulders or close his eyes. He isn’t perfectly still either. A part of Stan expected something like that. Maybe the Ford in his memories was more closed off and brittle than this one is now.

Ford’s eyes looks like a ship that sunk with the lanterns still lit, a faint glow still shining through a murky ocean. “That’s quite alright, too” he says softly, and the muted glow he gives off smothers the few muffled, fragmented glimpses of anger and hate that Stan can recall in his mind’s eye.

The morning is cold. Stan is tired. He thinks maybe he's been tired all his life. But it's different now. It's a warm and satisfied weight on his back. Stan Pines doesn't quite know what he had or how he got here. But he knows that whatever he's missing doesn't quite bother him as much as it should. Maybe if he tried, he might remember-

_Towering figures and the large firm grip of his father's hand on his arm. The high pitched, agitated chatter of his mother and perpetual, angry blaring of New Jersey traffic._

_A shy boy with glasses at his side morphs into no one at his side, only hypothermic red metal and purple-blue lips like a bruise, too tired to breathe, to think. Frozen windshields and frozen toes on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere._

_Then the metallic rush of blood and the interior of a trunk in his mouth. Hysterical, animalistic fear. Teeth chipped or missing. Jagged, desperate wounds in his mouth. Coughing and spitting out blood and gagging for hours and days afterward. His frantic pulse tells him he's alive. The deep ache in his bones tells him he's alive. Somehow, he keeps living._

But he doesn't try that hard, so the almost-memories slink back under the fog of his adolescence, lulled back into slumber in his old mind.

But none of that matters. Stan Pine's life began on the Beach of New Jersey, and it began again in a dilapidated, moldy shack in the woods. Anything beyond that, whatever happened in between, well, it's of no use to him now. The only thing that matters is the gentle hold of his brother's six-fingered hand in his, the echo of Mabel calling to her brother from far upstairs, the excited drum roll of footsteps in the attic.

So maybe he doesn't have everything he needs. Maybe he has thirty-something years’ worth of memories missing in his head. Maybe he's old and tired and doesn't quite know the specifics of how he got to be that way. But what he does have, the beginnings and the ends, that's enough to make up for the missing middle, anyway.

Stan Pines is fifty eight. He has about fifteen years of memories, more or less. The important things, the names and faces and dates. That time Soos called him Dad. His brother's honest laugh. Dipper's quiet happiness, his sister's shining face. This is what he wants, he decides. It feels like something he already decided long ago.


End file.
